The letters of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Despite the well-established American loathing of politicians as a class, everything seems to get named after them. (Everything public, that is. In the private, semiprivate, and nonprofit sectors, marquees tend to feature big donors and, increasingly, big corporations. Citi Field, indeed.) Politicians who get elected President have pride of place. Here in New York, besides Washington and his Square (and his Bridge), we have Madison and his Square (and his Avenue), Lincoln and his Center (and his Tunnel), and Roosevelt and his Island (and his Drive). Lesser pols don’t fare too badly, either. Besides LaGuardia and his Airport, there’s Foley Square, the downtown plaza bounded by imposing halls of justice. It honors Thomas F. (Big Tom) Foley (1852-1925), a prominent alderman, saloonkeeper, and Tammany Hall sachem. The Tweed Courthouse is a stone’s throw away. But what about the writers? Where are the monumental public works, the great public spaces, dedicated to the likes of Emerson and Twain, Edgar Allan Poe and Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Thurber and James Baldwin? New York has a Thomas E. Dewey Thruway. Couldn’t we at least have a John Dewey Rest Stop? Will scribblers never get their due?

Well, yes—a little. At some point in the only slightly distant future, this deplorable imbalance will be, quite noticeably, altered. The backstory begins in 1964, when, in an incomprehensible act of civic vandalism, Pennsylvania Station was torn down. Its replacement—the third and least distinguished iteration of Madison (him again!) Square Garden—did not remotely compensate for the loss of one of the world’s grandest railway palaces. The trains and their passengers were relegated to grimy basements. “New Yorkers were left with a subway station when there had once been the Baths of Caracalla,” a certain writer recalled thirty years later.

This week, after years of false starts and bureaucratic tangles, a modest groundbreaking ceremony will be held for a project that will go some distance to righting this great wrong. The reincarnation of Penn Station will occupy and transform the body of the monumental Farley Post Office, across Eighth Avenue from the original station and, like the original, a creation of McKim, Mead & White, the heroic architectural firm of a century ago. When the place opens for business, it will carry the name of a writer—the writer quoted above. It will be called Moynihan Station.

To be sure, this honor is not being bestowed upon the shade of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) because he was a writer. It is bestowed because he was a politician—in this instance, a highly effective, bring-home-the-bacon, jobs-for-the-boys politician. He originated the project and, as a senator from New York, used the powers of his office to push for it relentlessly, year after year. True, he might never have had the idea were it not for his contemplative, professorial side—he was, after all, a former director of the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies. But his success in bringing it off was due rather more to his professional kinship with Big Tom Foley. Or with James A. Farley, F.D.R.’s patronage chief, whose name will be displaced by his own on the repurposed building’s façade.

Nevertheless, Pat Moynihan was, first, last, and always, a writer. “When I was five years old, I asked my mother, what does Dad do?” his daughter, Maura, recalls in a charming afterword to a splendid new book. “She replied, he’s a writer. And he was: he wrote every day—even at Christmas—articles, books, speeches, and, in great abundance, letters.” You might say he wrote his way to power. Without the writing, no foot-in-the-door job in John F. Kennedy’s Labor Department (and no influence once he was there), no high domestic-policy post in Richard Nixon’s White House, no ambassadorships to India and the United Nations, no twenty-four years in the Senate—and no Moynihan Station.

A book appeared every other year or so. There were more than a score in all, many of them banged out during summer breaks in an old one-room schoolhouse at the Moynihans’ upstate rural retreat. The author’s subjects were the statesman’s passions: poverty, especially in relation to family breakdown; the persistence of ethnicity; the limits, errors, and necessity of social policy; in matters of war and peace, liberal illusions and conservative excesses. The new book is different: the familiar Moynihanian themes are echoed throughout, but this time it’s all about him.

“Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary” (PublicAffairs; $35) will probably be read more widely and for longer, and certainly with greater pleasure, than any of the others on the Moynihan shelf. Besides the letters (to a range of correspondents stretching from John Lennon and John Updike to Rajiv Gandhi and the socks department at Brooks Brothers), there are memorandums (many to the four Presidents he served, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford being the others), notes to himself summarizing conversations he considered important, and entries from his private journal, which include some delightful travel writing.

Apart from the periodic “Dear New Yorker” letters he franked to a mailing list of constituents, none of this material was written explicitly for publication. But nearly all of it suggests an awareness, sometimes a hope, that it might sooner or later find readers beyond those to whom it was addressed—a category that may or may not include a 1989 “MOST CONFIDENTIAL” letter to the admissions committee of his beloved Century Club. In a bid to blackball Pamela Harriman, the socially active widow of an early political patron of his, Averell Harriman, Moynihan wrote, “It is depressing to say this, but I would find it difficult to enter the Century were there any prospect of this person being there.” The person got in anyway; the Senator remained a club fixture. Not for the first time, Moynihan’s advice was rejected; not for the last, he carried on regardless.

The Moynihan papers are the largest one-man collection in the Library of Congress—ten thousand pages, enough to lay a paper trail from the White House to the Capitol. From this mother lode of foolscap, the journalist Steven R. Weisman has sculpted a work of coherence and energy. Weisman, who covered Moynihan for the Times in New York, Washington, and New Delhi, and knew him well for decades, introduces the book with a lively essay that is part biography, part political and psychological analysis, part appreciation, and part personal reminiscence. “What I found in editing these letters,” Weisman writes, “is not so much a different Moynihan, but a Moynihan more passionate, intimate, vulnerable, combative, and perhaps more self-absorbed than the one seen by the public.”

As it happens, I (speaking of self-absorption!) once spent a convivial cocktail hour with him and Sidney Blumenthal, then the Washington correspondent for this magazine, in the Senator’s hideaway office in the Capitol building. The lamplight was warm, the curtains drawn, the leather and mahogany dark. Out came the Scotch and the Marlboros. The corpse of Soviet Communism had barely cooled at the time, and our talk wandered from the causes of its demise to the radicalism of New York intellectuals in the nineteen-thirties and forties—the Communists, their fellow-travellers, their socialist and Trotskyist enemies—and thence to the curious ways in which the influence of those lingering enmities is still felt. As a writer for small magazines like Commentary and The Reporter, and later for The Public Interest, Moynihan had been acquainted with many of the participants and their subsequent ideological meanderings, some of which mirrored his own. Seersucker jacket off but bow tie still in place, he held forth in his inimitable (if often parodied) manner: the “ah-ah-ahs,” the staccato bursts, the random pauses, the arrhythmic rhythms. He was the John Cage of conversation. After our drink, he took us for a ride on the Senate’s Toonerville trolley, a toylike, rubber-tired subway with open-topped cars, which glides between the Capitol and the Russell Office Building. As the little train began to move, Moynihan stood up in the very front, assumed a heroic stance, and, pointing toward the destination, cried, “To the Finland Station!”

Our fellow-passengers, well-scrubbed young aides and one or two dim-looking senators, chuckled nervously or simply looked baffled. I pondered that moment as I read this book. Weisman takes note of Moynihan’s “wit and sparkle” and his “gift for flattery.” The former were certainly on display at that moment, but so was the latter. We were flattered—at least I was—not only by Moynihan’s willingness to make a spectacle of himself for our amusement but also by his assumption that we would “get” his allusions: Lenin; “socialist realist” portraiture; the sealed train to St. Petersburg in 1917; Edmund Wilson. That the other passengers apparently didn’t get it added a hint of gleeful snobbery to our pleasure, as I suspect he knew it would. A bit of harmless fun, that time. But in more consequential situations he was an instinctive master of the art. He knew how to flatter you high and he knew how to flatter you low. And when he set out to manipulate his interlocutors he generally did so in the service of some noble goal, sincerely held. He was anything but a cynic.

Throughout his adult life, Pat Moynihan was part of so many different and opposing worlds that having it both ways was almost a way of life for him, for good and for ill. He was a streetwise Irish lad shining shoes for dimes in Times Square who adopted the vocabulary (“perforce,” “at all events,” “of a sudden”) and tweedy wardrobe of a dandified Oxford don. He was an occasionally observant if less than pious Catholic who became part of that circle of secular, mostly Jewish New York intellectuals whose style of thought and expression, if not their current politics, was rooted in the polemics of the kind of exotic Marxist radicalisms that never tempted him. He was a cradle-to-grave Democrat who held his highest appointive offices in Republican administrations. Within the Democratic Party, he had the id of a regular and the superego of a reformer. He was a conservative among liberals and a liberal among conservatives. He was a social scientist who did politics and a politician who did social science. He craved the quiet security of academic life but repeatedly abandoned it for the risks and tumults of public office. It’s not that he was neither here nor there; it’s that he was both.

These tensions and crosscuttings make for a stimulating book, just as they made for an adventurous mind and an eventful life. The tensions were more often creative than crippling. Moynihan’s doubleness was a powerful spur to the originality that marked his thinking on public policy. It was the bedrock of his genuine independence, intellectual and political. He was commonly called a centrist and had no particular objection to the label. But he was no mere splitter of differences. He did not discover his ideas by averaging the distance between the ideas of others. He was more apt to take a leap outside the existing spectrum of choices. “I find myself once more in that pitiable role of the meliorist,” he observed dryly in a 1990 letter to a journalist friend. But, of course, Moynihan’s meliorism had a Moynihan twist. The letter was about his ingenious effort to re-start the stalled debate on gun control by shifting the focus to what comes out of the barrel. “Guns don’t kill people, bullets do” was his summary—the sort of tart coinage he was famous for (“defining deviancy down”; “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts”). His most dizzying leaps had a way of falling short of a safe landing. His audacious Family Assistance Plan of 1969, which would have guaranteed a cash income to the poor as a matter of right, persuaded a Republican President but not a Democratic Congress. In the Senate, his largeness of vision produced no grand piece of landmark legislation; there is no Moynihan equivalent of the Wagner Act. With guns, though, he had a modest success with a modest idea, guiding to passage a ban on so-called cop-killer bullets—“the first law ever to outlaw a round of ammunition,” he noted with satisfaction.

Originality and independence were one side of Moynihan’s doubleness; the other was the way it invited mistrust and misunderstanding, the consequences of which, to judge from the letters, preoccupied him increasingly over time. A volatile, Jekyll-Hyde dynamic lights up “A Portrait in Letters” like the poles of a battery. Especially when two phenomena—Nixon and, later, neoconservatism—enter the picture, the sparks fly.

The Nixon years were Moynihan’s apotheosis as a flatterer. In 1968, he campaigned for Robert Kennedy and endorsed Hubert Humphrey, but he began to “reach out” (a phrase he would have despised) to their nemesis months before the nominating conventions. With the election a week away—and three weeks after admonishing a top aide to President Johnson to “have no fear” that he would accept a job with the enemy—he writes a Heepish letter. “Dear Mr. Nixon: I was greatly impressed by your radio address on the subject of employment. . . .” Once ensconced in the victor’s White House as Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs, he unleashed a stream of memorandums that played his new boss—whose aspirational insecurities, base resentments, and longing to flummox the critics he well understood—like a Stradivarius.

It was (and is) unusual for a President, especially an egghead-baiting Republican held in near-universal contempt by academics and intellectuals, to receive long, elegantly written interoffice memos packed with literary allusions, sociological erudition, and asides like “Thanks to a conversation with Erik Erikson (who is surely the most significant psychiatrist since Freud) I believe I have an answer.” There are sarcastic shots at smug liberals, too, of course—shots that he had his own reasons to take, quite apart from the tactic of massaging Nixon’s rancors. Moynihan was still smarting from the response, four years earlier, to “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”—the so-called Moynihan Report, which he had written for Johnson, and which prominent liberals, black and white, had obtusely attacked as an exercise in blaming the victim. (In truth, he had blamed the vicious legacy of slavery.) But Moynihan’s purpose in his memos to Nixon is always clear. They are earnest, passionate tutorials aimed at coaxing and harrying him to take the lead in renewing, and recasting, the assault on poverty, especially black poverty, which had started and sputtered under the previous Administration.

The Vietnam War made the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies a bitter and contentious time. Moynihan hoped that the new President would reverse Johnson’s escalations. Though he disdained what he called, in a memo dated April 15, 1969, “the elemental dishonesty and outrageousness of so much of the provocation from the left,” he thought the war a disaster and told Nixon so. “Unless I am mistaken,” he wrote in that same memo, “America has ‘lost’ its first war: Four years, $65 billion, and 212,022 casualties have not enabled the most powerful nation on earth to overcome the resistance of a vastly out-gunned, out-numbered enemy.” A month later, he ended a long domestic-policy memo—about adopting a nonracial “income strategy” to combat black poverty and white working-class backlash—with a plea: “I don’t have to say again that the one indispensable step to doing that is to get us out of Vietnam, and on this you have my prayers and respect.”

His prayers went unanswered, and the universities—Moynihan’s world, or one of them—resumed their revolt against the war. More or less alone in the Nixon circle, Moynihan understood that revolt and, strikingly, sympathized with it. He agonized over its slide toward an angry rejection of American society and deplored the Administration’s role in stoking that anger. He begged his colleagues to distinguish between the mainstream protesters and “the extreme elements in the ‘peace movement.’ ” The day after the student-led demonstrations of October 15, 1969, he reported on it to Nixon:

The Moratorium was a success. It was not perhaps as big as some may have anticipated—“substantial but not enormous,” in David Brinkley’s words—but in style and content it was everything the organizers could have hoped for. The young white middle class crowds were sweet tempered and considerate: at times even radiant. (Really. The only term by which to describe the march past the White House is joyous.) The movement lost no friends. It gained, I should think, a fair number of recruits and a great deal of prestige.

By the time the Watergate scandal erupted, after the 1972 election, Moynihan was in New Delhi. In a long, anguished, stream-of-consciousness letter to the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, with whom he had collaborated on “Beyond the Melting Pot,” a pioneering book on ethnicity, he poured out frustrations, regrets, rationalizations, feelings of betrayal and guilt. “Have I been a fool or a whore or both? Or perhaps something quite different; something perhaps to be forgiven.” When the President resigned, the Ambassador convened the Embassy staff and improvised a sad, wise, eloquent speech. Nixon’s actions, he said,

were impeachable acts. They were subsumed under the headings of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The President acknowledged this. That in the jury of his peers that would be so held, and so there need be no question of anybody being railroaded, or an election being stolen, or of a man being destroyed unbetimes. . . . We have been spared the sense of the spectacle of a President holding to his office long past the point of the public’s wishing him to do so.

“God save us from labels,” Moynihan wrote to the social critic Christopher Lasch. The label in question was one he disliked so much that he preferred to put it between quotation marks (as if handling it with a pair of tweezers) and to insert a hyphen (as if to deny it the dignity of being a real word). He explained its origins in a 1979 letter to Peter Steinfels, of the liberal, lay Catholic magazine Commonweal:

I take it that just now “neo-conservatism” is all the rage. This will be reassuringly alarming news to a great many persons of the sort you and I will tend to know. But would you consider that the far more significant effect is likely to be much less complicated. A good many persons of open mind and friendly mien will simply learn that the smartest people these days are something called Neo-conservatives, and adapt their own dispositions accordingly.

Is it a service to liberalism to encourage this? Irving [Kristol] and a few others apart, none of us is a conservative. We are liberals much as John F. Kennedy was liberal. A bit more so. The term “neo-conservative” was coined in epithet. One “fraction” of the socialist democrats having been expelled by another “fraction,” the expelled “fraction” promptly labeled the new controlling group to be “neo-conservative.” A familiar enough business.

To John Updike, in 1992, he put it more pithily:

For getting on to forty years I have been involved with a group of persons who in the 1970s got labeled—from the left—neo-conservatives. All had thought themselves liberals (if not Trotskyites) up to that point, and much confusion has followed.

Reading “A Portrait,” one can see why Moynihan was so insistent on resisting both the label and the “disposition” it came to represent. Unlike some of the early (and actual) neoconservatives, he had never been a radical; he was immune from ideological euphoria. Like Glazer, Daniel Bell, and Seymour Martin Lipset—other putative “neo-conservatives” who never went off the deep end, so to speak—he was grounded in empirical social science, and his earliest passion was for domestic policy. His quarrels with liberals and liberalism were sometimes rancorous, but they did not turn on any fundamental disagreement about the ultimate destination. In one of several letters protesting being tagged with the label he scorned, he wrote:

Those of us who began writing on these matters in the 1960’s were fully in agreement with all that liberalism was attempting. But we began to worry as to whether we would bring it off. This kind of critique was much too often greeted as a renunciation of goals rather than an inquiry as to means.

Moynihan was the only one of his intellectual circle who ever ran for, and won, high public office. In 1976, the year he was elected to the Senate, he was close to the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party—he went to the Convention as a delegate for Henry (Scoop) Jackson—but he built his own nest in the aviary. As America’s representative at the United Nations, he waged fierce diplomatic and rhetorical battle against the Soviet Union. But he did not share the neoconservative fear that the Soviets were somehow stronger than the United States and its democratic allies. As early as 1979, he publicly predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse from internal stresses. Writing to John Chancellor, of NBC, in the redolent year of 1984, he argued that a sensible strategy

must begin with the central fact of Soviet failure. They cannot modernize their economy. They cannot expect to keep their empire together. Etc. Therefore, they will decline. Therefore our strategy should be to permit this decline to go forward without erupting into one last spasmodic effort to restore their fortunes by seizing the Gulf, or striking Western Europe, or even launching a first strike against the United States. . . . We must, in effect, manage the Soviet decline, and particularly assure them that we have no intention of trying to hasten it.

He dismissed the C.I.A.’s—and, by extension, the neoconservatives’—obsession with the supposed threat of Communism in Nicaragua. (“They saw the Marxists there as a new wave,” he wrote to George Mitchell. “When they were a last gasp. When an idea dies in Madrid it takes two generations for word to get to Managua.”) In his final decade in the Senate, he advocated a foreign policy based on strengthening international law. Neoconservatives hold the very phrase in contempt.

If Moynihan were still alive, he would be eighty-three. One can’t help speculating about what he would have made of the recent past. Like Orwell, the Bible, and the Federalist Papers, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary” can be quoted to serve any number of agendas. But I find it hard to believe that he would have been an enthusiast of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Despite his admiration and affection for the first President Bush, he had opposed the 1991 Gulf War, advocating harsh economic sanctions instead, and his experience on the Senate Intelligence Committee had taught him to be skeptical of “intelligence.” He would have angrily denounced the use of torture, as a gross violation of elementary morality and of domestic and international law. He would have had no patience for global-warming denialism; a White House memo he wrote in 1969—1969!—explained the problem (“The process is a simple one. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has the effect of a pane of glass in a greenhouse”) and urged the Administration to tackle it. He would have joyfully welcomed Barack Obama’s election as, among other things, a vindication of his own hopes for progress toward racial equality—even if, soon enough, he might have been heard to harrumph that the new President was letting health-care reform get in the way of a full-on Keynesian attack on unemployment. Well, we’ll never know. We’ll have to settle for knowing that, one day, we’ll be able to hop in a cab and cry: To the Moynihan Station! ♦

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.